Doug Ford vs. the Mayors

December 20, 2023·48 min·4 clips

Why did Toronto City Council rename a stadium after Rob Ford a decade after chaotic scandals?

The episode begins with a pitch. Jesse Brown opens with Canadaland's crowdfunding appeal, tying listener support to careful, creative reporting. Then Peel takes over. The hosts walk through the Ford government's decision to abandon the breakup of Peel Region, even though the Hazel McCallion Act had already been put into law this spring. The setup is strange before the policy even starts. The promise is described as something the premier made to Hazel McCallion on her deathbed, and the hosts give that detail the dry disbelief it deserves. From there, they get into the mechanics. Dissolving Peel would have made Mississauga, Caledon, and Brampton single-tier cities instead of municipalities sharing regional services. Mississauga had an obvious reason to want out. It was the biggest city, with the strongest property tax base, and it helped pay for services like paramedics and policing in Brampton and Caledon. The province pitched the breakup in the usual language: more autonomy, less red tape, better efficiency, more housing. The housing part gets side-eyed. One host says that link was always personally unclear, which makes it sound less like a worked-out mechanism and more like a line the government kept repeating. Then comes the reversal. The province now says the transition-board process showed that dissolving the region would, in the housing minister's words, "cost people a lot of money." That lands awkwardly. The same government passed the breakup into law, then treated the cost problem like something it had just discovered. The excerpt places this beside other Ford government retreats after reelection. Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown appears briefly as an opponent of the plan, and the ending drifts into strong mayors, traffic, and other provincial grudges without forcing everything into a neat package. The politics stay procedural, local, and weirdly personal.

As heard by us

A sharp Ontario politics read on Ford's Peel reversal and the municipal costs behind the climbdown.

Doug Ford's clash with Ontario municipalities lands here through a concrete reversal: the province backed away from dissolving Peel region after passing the Hazel McCallion Act earlier that year.

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Why you'd press play

If you like political reversals with receipts, start here.

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